Nscale, the UK-headquartered AI infrastructure provider.
Courtesy: Nscale
Two years ago, Nscale was a brand new startup in the U.K. that had yet to raise any outside funding or officially announce its existence.
Last year the London-based company came out of stealth, and in December announced that it had raised its Series A fundraising, totaling $155 million.
Now, Nscale finds itself at the center of the action in the hottest market on the planet: artificial ininformigence. And it has close to $700 million in fresh capital from Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company.
In press releases on Tuesday, Nscale was named as an AI infrastructure partner for Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI, as the companies expand their buildouts in the U.K. Nscale then declared it signed a five-year $6.2 billion agreement with Microsoft and Aker to develop “hyperscale AI infrastructure” in Europe, specifically Norway, where Aker is headquartered.
OpenAI built prior headlines with Nscale, announcing plans in July for a data center in Norway for a Stargate-branded AI data center. Nscale agreed to commit $1 billion for the project, with the goal of racking up 100,000 Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) at the site before 2027.
It’s a remarkably quick rise for a company that wasn’t even around when OpenAI kicked off the generative AI boom with the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. At that time, what’s now Nscale was part of Arkon Energy, which was established a year earlier to provide infrastructure for cryptocurrency mining. Nscale was spun out to address soaring demand for data centers capable of handling AI workloads.
Like CoreWeave, which went public this year and now sports a market cap of $58 billion, Nscale is combining data center space, power and lots of GPUs with its own software in order to an provide finish-to-finish service for AI infrastructure.
CoreWeave, which supplies infrastructure to Microsoft, Google, Nvidia and OpenAI, also has roots in crypto. Founded in 2017, the company built up its initial fleet of Nvidia GPUs for ethereum mining before pivoting to AI.
Nscale didn’t respond to a request for comment following this week’s announcements, but CEO Josh Payne, who previously founded Arkon, informed CNBC in late July that the company was tarobtaining two large problems in Europe. One is a lack of sufficient computing capacity and the other is a “very fragmented market.”
“What the continent requireds is large AI infrastructure projects deploying compute [power],” Payne declared, after the announcement with OpenAI for the Norway buildout. “The ecosystem can consume from the project to build AI products, to generate productivity growth and economic benefit.”
Payne wrote in a LinkedIn post on Wednesday that the agreement with Microsoft and Aker is a “huge win for European-owned AI infrastructure.”
Europe has been pushing the concept of “sovereign AI,” requiring data centers and AI workloads to be located and processed on European soil. Nscale has quickly emerged as an important player in the U.K.’s bid to evolve into a global leader in AI. In January, Britain laid out an AI “action plan,” promising to reduce bureaucracy to assist its domestic AI sector thrive.
While Nscale is addressing the European market, many of its early partners are large U.S. AI vfinishors. They timed their announcements on Tuesday to President Donald Trump’s state visit to the U.K.
On Wednesday, Trump visited Windsor Castle and met with King Charles, Queen Camilla and other members of the royal family. His trip comes at a contentious moment for U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who is under pressure to bring stability to the counattempt after the exit of Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner over a hoapply tax scandal and a major cabinet reshuffle.
Microsoft headlined the U.K. announcements, committing $15.5 billion of new investment to computing equipment. The software giant declared it plans to work with Nscale to construct what will become the U.K.’s largest supercomputer in Loughton, a suburban town in the English county of Essex.
The site will initially hoapply 23,040 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs to be delivered in the first quarter of 2027. When it goes live, it will generate 50 megawatts of AI capacity, scalable to 90 megawatts, according to a statement from Nscale.
“No one can build that kind of capital investment unless they’ve obtained somebody already committed to spfinish the money once the work is complete, and that’s the role we’re playing,” Microsoft President Brad Smith declared Tuesday, adding the deal represents a major vote of confidence in Nscale.
OpenAI declared it would launch a U.K. version of Stargate through a partnership with Nscale and Nvidia. OpenAI will deploy 8,000 GPUs in the project’s first phase early next year, with the option to expand capacity to approximately 31,000 GPUs over time.
Stargate U.K. will operate across a number of sites in the counattempt — one of the early ones being Cobalt Park, an industrial state in the Northern English city Newcastle. Stargate was initially spawned in the U.S. in January as part of President Trump’s effort to push investments in AI infrastructure.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attfinishs the “Winning the AI Race” Summit in Washington D.C., U.S., July 23, 2025.
Kent Nishimura | Reuters
Nvidia’s announcement on Tuesday included an investment of up to £11 billion ($15 billion) with Nscale and CoreWeave to boost U.K. AI infrastructure.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang separately revealed on Wednesday that the chipbuildr had built a £500 million ($683 million) equity investment into Nscale.
“We convinced ourselves that Nscale could be a national champion for AI infrastructure in the U.K.,” Huang informed journalists at a press conference in London.
Nick Patience, AI practice lead at the Futurum Group, informed CNBC that Nscale is “a key part of Nvidia’s push in the U.K. market and an acknowledgment by the government that it has to do something to obtain the AI infrastructure built here, which has been a long slog.”
Rapid growth
After exiting stealth in May of last year, Nscale’s first public announcement came two months later, when the company partnered with UAE’s Open Innovation AI to deploy 30,000 GPUs. Around the same time, Nscale declared it was acquiring Kontena, which was founded in 2018 and specialized in high-performance computing data centers.
The next month, Nscale announced an agreement with Asian telecom company Singtel to offer a “GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS),” and serve customers in Europe and Southeast Asia. Initially, Nscale’s infrastructure relied on GPUs from Advanced Micro Devices. Today, the startup promotes various offerings from market leader Nvidia.
Nscale’s large financing landed in December, when the company declared it raised $155 million in a round led by Sandton Capital Partners, with participation from Kestrel0x1, Blue Sky Capital Managers and Florence Capital.
Sandton co-founder Rael Nurick declared in the press release that with its “unique vertically integrated approach, Nscale is building the hyperscale AI platform to power AI at scale.”
Nscale declared at the time that it had grown its AI data center pipeline to 1.3 gigawatts from 300 megawatts the prior year to and that it was aiming to have 350,000 GPUs running by the finish of 2027.
By comparison, CoreWeave declared at a banking conference last week that its portfolio consists of “about 2.2 gigawatts of capacity that’s coming online.” The company declared in its IPO prospectus in March that its 32 data centers were running 250,000 GPUs.
It’s been a whirlwind few years for Payne, Nscale’s founder. While he was serving as executive chairman of Arkon, he was also operating chief at Australia’s Battery Future Acquisition Corp., a blank check company that declares it’s “tarobtaining critical battery minerals and related supply chains.”
He’s obtained a lot of work in front of him.
Building out AI data centers with costly GPUs is a capital intensive process that’s historically required a hefty amount of debt. CoreWeave had raised a total of $12.4 billion in debt through the finish of 2024, in addition to well over $1 billion in equity financing before its IPO. It announced a $1.5 billion bond sale in July after a $2 billion debt offering in May.
Nscale was attempting to raise $1.8 billion earlier this year through a private credit deal led by bankers at Goldman Sachs, according to Bloomberg.
In the December video tied to Nscale’s equity fundraising, Payne called it “one of the largest Series As raised in U.K., European history.” He declared the company would apply the cash to deploy up to another 4,000 GPUs in its data center in Norway and to develop up to 180 megawatts of capacity in the company’s portfolio.
The aim, Payne declared, was to deploy 50,000 GPUs by the finish of 2025 and 150,000 by the finish of next year.
“The key challenges that we see in the market is the significant increase in density at the GPU level,” he declared. “This funding allows us to scale up materially” he declared, and to become “one of the largest players in Europe.”
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